Just Plain WEIRD…!

The Polaris Slingshot Grand Touring might even make other Slingshot owners take notice.

Even though it was first introduced four years ago, the three-wheeled Polaris Slingshot is still quite the attention-getter when spotted “in the wild.” Should you wish to stand out even more, however, you might want to pick up the just-announced Grand Touring model.

Specs-wise, the Slingshot Grand Touring is essentially the same beast as the SL version that we reviewed in 2016.

Well, as you’ve no doubt already noticed in the photos, it’s got a roof. Called the Slingshade, the color-matched appendage incorporates two gullwing half-doors, allowing for unobstructed entry and exit. Adding to rider comfort are special quilted seats, and a taller-than-normal 9.5-inch (241-mm) clear wind deflector.

Inside, the 7-inch Ride Command Display multitouch infotainment system offers features such as turn-by-turn navigation, Bluetooth/USB smartphone connectivity, a 100-watt Rockford Fosgate audio system, and the output from a rear back-up camera.

Rounding out the extra bits and bobs are a color-matched rear fender, and a “premium” Black Crystal/White Pearl metallic paint job.

Pricing for the Slingshot Grand Touring starts at US$29,499. You can see it in action – along with some of the other 2019 models – in the following video.

Getting serious about plant intelligence

Monica Gagliano studies learning and memory in plants. She’s an “evolutionary ecologist” who performs behavioral experiments on plants that are adapted from studies of animal intelligence. Her work has convinced her that plants learn and have memories. Gagliano’s been cited in The New Yorker, and she spoke recently to radiolab. Her peer-reviewed conclusions are at times controversial, though specific criticisms of her methodologies have been sparse. In promoting her upcoming book, Thus Spoke the Plant, she gave a thought-provoking interview to Andréa Morris writing for Forbes in May 2018.

Gagliano admits it’s a field of study that not everyone takes seriously, and she’s weary of being lumped in with the group of 36 scientists who published a 2006 article announcing the birth of “plant neurobiology,” a provocative choice considering that plants don’t have neurons, at least in their usual sense. Gagliano says that rather than advance further research, their announcement impeded it, at least in part due to the intense objections it provoked that still resonate. As recently as 2013, cellular and molecular physiologist Clifford Slayman told Michael Pollan in the above-cited The New Yorker piece that plant neurobiology was, “the last serious confrontation between the scientific community and the nuthouse on these issues.”

For skeptics, the plant neurobiology article was likely just another bit of ridiculousness after the now-largely discredited 1973 book The Secret Life of Plants credited plants with consciousness — and psychic abilities. Daniel Chamovitz, author of What a Plant Knows says that 1973 book “stymied important research on plant behavior as scientists became wary of any studies that hinted at parallels between animal senses and plant senses.”

Another roadblock to what Gagliano calls “plant cognitive ecology” research is, she says, that, “Many plant biologists, especially physiologists, are actually very much into little molecules and little signals and this chemical does this and therefore the plant does this and on and on.” To the ecologist, “In a sense, there is no plant and environment. The plant and environment are one unit. For me, a plant isn’t an object, it’s always a subject that is interacting with other subjects in the environment. I had to learn. I just assumed that everyone would see things like this. But no.”

Gagliano believes nonetheless that by being meticulous with her own methodology, and by being rigorously discriminating in her conclusions, she’s producing science that will eventually be validated. She finds the usual dismissiveness of the entire field maddeningly unscientific: “It’s counterproductive when a new field needs good, solid, strong, data-driven science. Instead, it dilutes, in a way, the impact that the science could have. It’s kind of unacceptable in any field, let alone a new field. So for me, what this field really needs is true vision and data — more experimental work.”

Studying plant “behavior”

While “behavior” may seem an odd word to use, the undisputed fact is that plants do respond to stimuli, albeit often very slowly over the course of hours, days, or weeks. This makes it easy to feel like nothing is going on with them. Still, as Pollan points out, “A race of aliens living in a radically sped-up dimension of time arrive on Earth and, unable to detect any movement in humans, come to the logical conclusion that we are “inert material” with which they may do as they please. The aliens proceed ruthlessly to exploit us.”

Plants do, however, sometimes move in a time frame we can perceive, as in Gagliano’s controversial study of Mimosa pudica — or “touch-me-not” — a plant whose leaves fold when touched or disturbed, the assumption being that it’s the plant’s response to insects that might pose a threat.

Mimosa pudica (Hrushikesh)

In Gagliano’s experiment, she dropped 56 potted mimosas from a height of 15 centimeters, causing their leaves to fold as expected. Looking to find out if they could “habituate” to the disturbance, she repeated the process 60 times, finding that even after four to six drops, the mimosas no longer responded. “By the end, they were completely open,” she said in presenting her research to other scientists. “They couldn’t care less anymore.”

To eliminate fatigue as the explanation, and to see if the plants could remember what they’d learned, Gagliano left the mimosas to recover, retesting them in a week and again 28 days later. She found that their leaves no longer responded to being dropped, suggesting that the plants did, in fact, remember their lessons of nearly a month earlier. Gagliano concluded that brains like ours and animals’ may not actually be required for learning, but rather that there’s “some unifying mechanism across living systems that can process information and learn.” The audience response to her presentation was divided.

A sessile lifestyle

There’s an important challenge that plants face which must be recognized and factored in: They’re “sessile,” rooted to the ground and, as Pollan puts it, a plant “has to find everything it needs, and has to defend itself, while remaining fixed in place.” He writes that plants, therefore, require an “extensive and nuanced understanding” of what’s around them to have a chance of surviving. “A highly developed sensory apparatus is required to locate food and identify threats.”

Some Santas came from as far away as Japan.

COPENHAGEN (Reuters) – Braving Europe’s heatwave, more than 150 Santas from around the world donned their heavy suits and full beards at their annual conference in Denmark.

As the 61st World Santa Claus Congress kicked off in Copenhagen, many of the delegates – from countries as far away as Japan and the United States – took a paddle in the sea, to the amusement of local bathers.

The three-day event will see the Santas visit the Little Mermaid statue during a parade and go head to head in the Santa Obstacle Course World Championships.

“Normally us Santas work alone,” said Santa Ian Tom, 67, from Scotland, who is attending his sixth congress this year.

“This is like a big family. But a family you get on with.”

For Santa Douglas, 60, from Washington D.C., attending his twelfth convention, it’s the international feel of the event that keeps luring him back.

“It’s interesting how when meeting others their culture starts to rub off on you and yours on them. For example, a lot of the Santa suits now are not the traditional gray Danish one. They’ve gone more American, which in a way is a shame.”

The iEV X can go from 160 to 220 cm in length (Credit: iEV)We’ve already seen single-seat electric cars, the tiny size of which makes them ideal for maneuvering through congested urban environments. However, what happens when you want to carry a second passenger? In the case of the iEV X, the car just gets longer. Currently in functioning prototype form, the German-made iEV (Intelligent Electric Vehicle) X is just 78 cm wide (30.7 inches), and 160 cm long (63 inches) in single-passenger mode. When users want to bring someone else along, the car can be electrically lengthened to 190 cm (74.8 inches), allowing a folded second seat to pop up behind the driver’s. If they want to take on some extra cargo, the car can be further lengthened to 220 cm (86.6 inches).

The sides of the vehicle remain open when it’s extended.

Plans call for the 115-kg (254-lb) base model to be powered by a 48-volt lithium-ion battery pack, which should be good for a range of up to 60 km (37 miles) per 3-hour plug-in charge. A 40-watt rooftop solar panel will help charge the battery while the car is parked. The top speed is 45 km/h (28 mph).

The fancier 145-kg (320-lb) iEV X+ model should feature a higher-capacity 72-volt battery, a range of up to 120 km (75 miles), a 60-watt solar panel, and a top speed of 60 km/h (37 mph). Plans also call for an optional automatic robotic charging system, and even a pedal system to help boost battery range.

Additional features of both models should include power-retractible side mirrors, a wide-angle rearview camera, a 7-inch touchscreen display, a full LED lighting system, and a steel chassis with aluminum body panels.

Should you be interested in getting an iEV X, it’s currently the subject of a Kickstarter campaign. If it reaches production, an early bird pledge of €1,850 (about US$2,144) will get you the base model, with €7,850 ($9,098) required for the iEV X+. Sources: Kickstarter, iEV.

If it seems that it was just about a year ago that scientists finally figured out the mystery behind the Bermuda Triangle, it was. The culprits behind the legendary disappearances of ships and planes were said to be powerful hexagonal cloud formations. Except that now, a team led by Simon Boxall, an oceanographer from the Ocean and Earth Science, National Oceanography Centre Southampton at the University of Southampton, claims to have finally finally solved the riddle, and it’s not clouds. It’s ginormous rogue waves, a legendary maritime phenomenon all their own.

Monsters of the deep

Until the so-called 18.5-meter — that’s nearly 61 feet high — Draupner wave was observed, via satellite, on New Year’s Day in 1995, it wasn’t entirely certain that rogue waves weren’t just the stuff of maritime legend. These monsters are terrifying anomalies: Unpredictable massive walls of water coursing across the ocean, capable of wiping out most anything they happen to encounter.

According to site Freak Waves, rogue waves can have a force as powerful as 100 metric tons per square meter. For a sense of scale, a normal 12-meter wave produces about 6 metric tons of force. Ships are built to withstand about 15 metric tons per square meter. And the Draupner wave was nothing compared to other reported waves, such as the pair that injured 50 passengers a month later when the Queen Elizabeth II ran into them in North Atlantic bad weather. One, at least, was estimated to be about 95 feet high.

“At 0410 the rogue wave was sighted right ahead, looming out of the darkness from 220°, it looked as though the ship was heading straight for the white cliffs of Dover. The wave seemed to take ages to arrive but it was probably less than a minute before it broke with tremendous force over the bow. An incredible shudder went through the ship, followed a few minutes later by two smaller shudders. There seemed to be two waves in succession as the ship fell into the ‘hole’ behind the first one. The second wave of 28-29 m (period 13 seconds), whilst breaking, crashed over the foredeck, carrying away the forward whistle mast.” — Captain of the QE II

What’s this got to do with the Bermuda Triangle?

Simulated terror

One of the earliest ships to have disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle was the USS Cyclops, which disappeared en route from the West Indies to Baltimore in 1918. At 550 feet long, it was the largest ship in the U.S. Navy at the time, and not a trace of it was ever found. It was carrying manganese ore and had a crew of 309. Its last message before vanishing was “Weather Fair, All Well.”

USS Cyclops (wikimedia)

Numerous theories have been put forward over the years about what happened to the ship, including the possibility that it was an unacknowledged casualty of World War I, which had begun a year before its voyage.

Boxall’s team suspected the Cyclops was lost to a rogue wave and built an indoor simulation to demonstrate who it might have happened. Says Boxall, “If you can imagine a rogue wave with peaks at either end, there’s nothing below the boat, so it snaps in two. If it happens, it can sink in two to three minutes.” Other experts, such as Marvin W. Barrash, author of the book USS Cyclops, agree. Barrash told Forces.net, “She had a flat bottom, she rolled quite easily, and on one day she rolled approximately 50 degrees one way, and in the high forties the other way.”

Cyclops’ sister ships, Proteus and Nereus, also disappeared in the area, and they were also flat-bottomed.

Lovely weather for an aquatic behemoth

Boxall’s conclusion that rogue waves were behind other disappearances in the Triangle has to do in part with the area’s weather conditions being favorable to such monsters. Speaking on the UK’s Channel 5 program “The Bermuda Triangle Enigma,” Boxall notes that the Triangle’s climate is about right: “There are storms to the South and North, which come together… we’ve measured waves in excess of 30 meters. The bigger the boat gets, the more damage is done. And if there are additional ones from Florida, it can be a potentially deadly formation of rogue waves.”

Having said all that, is the Bermuda Triangle really real?

It depends on who you ask. According to the U.S. Coast Guard, that’s a “nope”:

The Coast Guard does not recognize the existence of the so-called Bermuda Triangle as a geographic area of specific hazard to ships or planes. In a review of many aircraft and vessel losses in the area over the years, there has been nothing discovered that would indicate that casualties were the result of anything other than physical causes. No extraordinary factors have ever been identified.

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, agrees, saying:

Environmental considerations could explain many, if not most, of the disappearances. The majority of Atlantic tropical storms and hurricanes pass through the Bermuda Triangle, and in the days prior to improved weather forecasting, these dangerous storms claimed many ships. Also, the Gulf Stream can cause rapid, sometimes violent, changes in weather. Additionally, the large number of islands in the Caribbean Sea creates many areas of shallow water that can be treacherous to ship navigation.

NOAA does concede that “there is some evidence to suggest that the Bermuda Triangle is a place where a ‘magnetic’ compass sometimes points towards ‘true’ north, as opposed to ‘magnetic’ north.

Still, NOAA finds, “The U.S. Navy and U.S. Coast Guard contend that there are no supernatural explanations for disasters at sea. Their experience suggests that the combined forces of nature and human fallibility outdo even the most incredulous science fiction.”

As science writer, Dr. Karl Kruszelnicki told News.com, “the number of planes that go missing in the Bermuda Triangle is the same as anywhere in the world on a percentage basis.”

This won’t, of course, convince every Bermuda Triangle believer, such as the Reddit member who posted in response to Boxall’s theory, “But that doesn’t explain the airplanes that went missing in the area…” Says another, “Flown over it a few times. Very disappointed that I’m still alive.”

President Trump was almost universally panned for the press conference that followed the meeting with Russia’s President Putin in Helsinki, Finland. Trump was seen as capitulating to Russia by refusing to confront Putin on the issue of past and present interference in American elections. In fact, the American president seemed to be saying he doesn’t support the findings of his own intelligence agencies and instead prefers to take the Russian leader at his word. Even if he’s changed his tune under the backlash.

Whether you believe Putin really has some kind of compromising material to make Trump do his bidding or if Trump is simply being nice to people who partially helped get him elected, or if you somehow still think, despite ample evidence to the contrary, that all this is much ado about nothing, the fact is President Putin is a very experienced former KGB officer. He has both the know-how and the intelligence to carry out very far-sighted and ingenious operations. We don’t know his endgame and neither do we know how much of his KGB training he still employs, but in light of current events, there may be a way for us to get a deeper understanding by studying the words of Yuri AlexandrovichBezmenov, a former KGB agent who defected to Canada in 1970.

In 1984, Bezmenov gave an interview to G. Edward Griffin from which much can be learned today. His most chilling point was that there’s a long-term plan put in play by Russia to defeat America through psychological warfare and “demoralization”. It’s a long game that takes decades to achieve but it may already be bearing fruit.

Bezmenov made the point that the work of the KGB mainly does not involve espionage, despite what our popular culture may tell us. Most of the work, 85% of it, was “a slow process which we call either ideological subversion, active measures, or psychological warfare.”

What does that mean? Bezmenov explained that the most striking thing about ideological subversion is that it happens in the open as a legitimate process. “You can see it with your own eyes,” he said. The American media would be able to see it, if it just focused on it.

Here’s how he further defined ideological subversion:

“What it basically means is: to change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite of the abundance of information no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country.”

Bezmenov described this process as “a great brainwashing” which has four basic stages. The first stage is called “demoralization” which takes from 15 to 20 years to achieve. According to the former KGB agent, that is the minimum number of years it takes to re-educate one generation of students that is normally exposed to the ideology of its country. In other words, the time it takes to change what the people are thinking.

He used the examples of 1960s hippies coming to positions of power in the ’80s in the government and businesses of America. Bezmenov claimed this generation was already “contaminated” by Marxist-Leninist values. Of course, this claim that many baby boomers are somehow espousing KGB-tainted ideas is hard to believe but Bezmenov’s larger point addressed why people who have been gradually “demoralized” are unable to understand that this has happened to them.

Referring to such people, Bezmenov said:

“They are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern [alluding to Pavlov]. You can not change their mind even if you expose them to authentic information. Even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still can not change the basic perception and the logic of behavior.”

Demoralization is a process that is “irreversible”. Bezmenov actually thought (back in 1984) that the process of demoralizing America was already completed. It would take another generation and another couple of decades to get the people to think differently and return to their patriotic American values, claimed the agent.

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Vladimir Putin in a KGB uniform around 1980

In what is perhaps a most striking passage in the interview, here’s how Bezmenov described the state of a “demoralized” person:

“As I mentioned before, exposure to true information does not matter anymore,” said Bezmenov. “A person who was demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him. Even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents, with pictures; even if I take him by force to the Soviet Union and show him [a] concentration camp, he will refuse to believe it, until he [receives] a kick in his fan-bottom. When a military boot crashes his balls then he will understand. But not before that. That’s the [tragedy] of the situation of demoralization.”

It’s hard not to see in that the state of many modern Americans. We have become a society of polarized tribes, with some people flat out rejecting facts in favor of narratives and opinions.

Once demoralization is completed, the second stage of ideological brainwashing is “destabilization”. During this two-to-five-year period, asserted Bezmenov, what matters is the targeting of essential structural elements of a nation: economy, foreign relations, and defense systems. Basically, the subverter (Russia) would look to destabilize every one of those areas in the United States, considerably weakening it.

The third stage would be “crisis”. It would take only up to six weeks to send a country into crisis, explained Bezmenov. The crisis would bring “a violent change of power, structure, and economy” and will be followed by the last stage, “normalization.” That’s when your country is basically taken over, living under a new ideology and reality.

This will happen to America unless it gets rid of people who will bring it to a crisis, warned Bezmenov. What’s more “if people will fail to grasp the impending danger of that development, nothing ever can help [the] United States,” adding, “You may kiss goodbye to your freedom.”

It bears saying that when he made this statement, he was warning about baby boomers and Democrats of the time.

In another, somewhat terrifying excerpt, here’s what Bezmenov had to say about what is really happening in the United States. It may think it is living in peace, but it has been actively at war with Russia. And for some time:

“Most of the American politicians, media, and educational system trains another generation of people who think they are living at the peacetime,” said the former KGB agent. ”False. United States is in a state of war: undeclared, total war against the basic principles and foundations of this system.”

Whether you think that is true may depend on your politics, but the reality of Russian active measures, as has been outlined in the recent indictments by the special counselor Robert Mueller, give Bezmenov’s words new urgency.

Say you’re engrossed in a task, scrolling through your phone or reading a book. Suddenly that creepy, prickly feeling grabs hold of you. Someone’s staring. You turn to find out who it is. Be they friend or foe, the feeling itself seems like an eerie sort of 6th sense. It’s also a necessary part of being human, an adaptation that kept our ancestors alive. So how is it that we can even do this? It’s actually an important feature of our sight, our brain, and certain social aspects of our species.

The biological phenomenon is known as “gaze detection” or “gaze perception.” Neurological studies have found that the brain cells which initiate this response are very precise. If someone turns their gaze off of you by turning just a few degrees to their left or right, that eerie feeling quickly fades. Scientists suggest that a complex neural network is behind gaze detection.

So far, the neural network responsible in humans remains unidentified. A study with macaque monkeys however, discovered the neurological circuits responsible for their gaze detection, even getting down to the specific cells involved.

We do know that ten distinct brain regions are involved with human sight, and there may be more. The visual cortex is the main contributor. This is a large area at the back of the brain, which supports many important aspects of sight. But other areas, such as the amygdala, which registers threats, must also be involved with gaze detection somehow.

Humans are sensitive to the gaze of others. When another person changes the direction of their attention, we automatically follow their gaze. It’s more than just being predators, who as a group are naturally sensitive and drawn toward changes in the environment. It also has to do with the cooperative and social nature of humans and how we’ve depended on one another throughout our history and development.

The visual cortex. By Coxer, Wikimedia Commons.

Another reason, if you look at human eyes in contrast to other animals, the sclera or white part surrounding the pupil is far larger. In most other species, the pupil takes up most of the eye. This is to obscure their eyes from predators. But for humans, a larger sclera allows us to notice the direction of each other’s gaze quickly.

Of course, we don’t have to be looking directly at someone to tell whether or not they’re staring at us. We can also evaluate the direction of their attention through our peripheral vision. But this method is much less accurate. A pair of studies finds that we can only accurately detect whether or not someone is staring at us within four degrees of our “central fixation point.”

It isn’t always about seeing another’s eyes. With our peripheral vision, we consider the position of their head. And other clues, such as how their body is positioned, lend to whether we think they’re looking at us or not. What if we’re not sure? Just to be safe, the brain errs on the side of caution. It assumes we’re being stared at, if there’s any doubt.

So what about when we feel someone staring from behind? According to a 2013 study published in the journal Current Biology, that’s just a fail-safe. Humans are hardwired to think that someone is starting at us when we can’t see them, even if we have no evidence to suggest so.

Psychology Professor Colin Clifford of the University of Sydney’s Vision Centre, found that when people can’t tell where a person is looking, they automatically assume they’re looking at them. “A direct gaze can signal dominance or a threat, and if you perceive something as a threat, you would not want to miss it,” he said. “So simply assuming another person is looking at you may be the safest strategy.”

Looking at someone is also a social cue. It usually means you want to talk to them. Since it’s our natural inclination to assume someone behind us is staring, the feeling we get may initiate a self-fulfilling prophecy. When we turn around, our action calls up the other person’s gaze. But when they meet our eyes, they give us the impression that they’ve been staring the whole time.

Another answer could be confirmation bias. We remember only the times we turned around and someone was staring (or appeared to be), and not the times they weren’t. And that weird, tingly sensation? It’s psychological and emanates from the thought of being stared at, not the physical act itself.

In country morphology, rectangularity and rotundity are not entirely mutually exclusive.

Take look at a map of Turkey and you’ll have to agree: it’s a curiously box-shaped country. Why is the wrong question. Like most international borders, Turkey’s are the result of geopolitical accident, not of aesthetic or geometric design. A more pertinent query: How rectangular is Turkey? Is it, perhaps, the most rectangular country in the world?

To answer that question, you’d have to find a dataset that minutely describes the borders of all countries on Earth and devise an algorithm that compares each country’s shape to an optimum rectangle with the same area.

That’s exactly what Australian geo-statistician David Barry did. His conclusion: Turkey is only the 15th most rectangular country in the world. The winner: Egypt.

Inevitably, one esoteric geographical question led to its opposite: What is the roundest country in the world? That one was answered by Gonzalo Ciruelos, an Argentinian mathematician. The top of that ranking is Sierra Leone.

As the winners in both categories indicate, Africa is a country of great diversity in geopolitical morphology. But the most curious country in either ranking is… the Vatican. As it turns out, the Papal State is both the 4th roundest and the 2nd most rectangular country in the world. How is that possible?

First, let’s have a closer look at the results. In Mr Barry’s definition, ‘optimum rectangularity’ is the maximum percentage overlap of a country with a rectangle of the same area.

He’s the first to admit that his algorithm may be inadequate for some countries with complex shapes (“Italy looks like the biggest country that might be wrong”), scattered geographies (e.g. Norway, because it includes Bouvet Island, a Norwegian dependency located between South Africa and Antarctica, freakishly far from the motherland) or locations on either side of the 180° longitude meridian (New Zealand, United States, Russia).

Also, the Natural Earth database includes small dependencies such as Scarborough Reef (1) as separate entries, which somewhat distorts a per-country ranking. Still, here goes:

Cutting through empty deserts, Egypt’s western and southern borders are completely straight—the Bir Tawil Trapezoid (2) is a notable but statistically insignificant exception. Combined with a fairly straight Mediterranean coastline in the north and its only slightly slanted Red Sea shore in the east, Egypt gets a ‘rectangularity’ score of 0.955 (out of 1), and the first place.

The Vatican’s actual borders are a lot more varied than this boxy rendition—perhaps because the database wasn’t built to reflect the delineation of the world’s smallest state in the greatest possible detail. That may explain why the geopolitical headquarters of the Catholic church manages to rank second in this list.

If you believe that the technology to live in space will be available to you within your lifetime; if you agree with the political philosophy outlined by the ‘World Passport’; if you find yourself in China, India, the U.S., Indonesia, or Brazil with a hankering to take to the stars, then perhaps you should consider becoming a citizen of Asgardia, an organization that hopes to be the first ‘country in space.’

Is this all a scam?

There’s not an implausible chance. Outsiders being offered IQ tests and then being told that they either have ‘just the intelligence’ needed for a ‘special project’ or that there’s something wrong with them that only someone else can fix — as Scientology has done for years — sounds like a scam.

The ear, grown to replace one lost in a car crash, will have functional blood vessels and nerve endings.

A car accident can be pretty traumatic for anyone, and the crash involving Army Pvt. Shamika Burrage was no exception. Two years ago, Burrage was driving her car when the front tire blew out, causing the vehicle to slide several hundred feet and flip several times. Burrage suffered head injuries and spinal fractures, as well as losing her left ear.

The other injuries eventually healed, but Burrage still had to live without her ear. She relied on prosthetics for a while, but recently her doctors at William Beaumont Army Medical Center in El Paso approached her with a new possible solution: to grow a brand new ear for her and attach it to her head.

The only catch is that they’d have to grow the ear inside of her arm.

This particular procedure, called a prelaminated forearm free flap, has been performed a few times before, but never by the Army. Doctors take cartilage from Burrage’s ribs and mold it into an ear shape. They then implant that cartilage beneath the skin of Burrage’s forearm. There, the cartilage can grow into a functional ear, complete with nerve endings and blood vessels. Finally, the ear is removed from her arm and attached to her head, along with extra skin from her arm to cover up the scars.

The procedure is still not completed, and Burrage still has to undergo two more surgeries, but once the procedure is completed the new ear should be virtually indistinguishable from her old one.

“The whole goal is by the time she’s done with all this, it looks good, it’s sensate, and in five years if somebody doesn’t know her they won’t notice,” said Lt. Col. Owen Johnson III, her surgeon at WBAMC.

And as for Burrage, she finally feels like she’s beginning to heal. “It’s been a long process for everything, but I’m back,” she said.

Aston Martin is presenting its Volante Vision flying taxi concept at the Farnsborough International Airshow this week.

Aston Martin is the latest transport heavyweight to enter the flying taxi scene, joining the likes of Boeing, Airbus and, now, Rolls-Royce. It has actually teamed up with the lattermost of these on its first vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft, which it says was dreamt up with luxury, inter-city travel in mind.

The names mentioned above are just a taste of the action taking place in the flying taxi space. NASA, for example, is investing in the development of advanced batteries to power these machines and is working on new air traffic management systems together with Uber, which is developing flying taxis of its own.

There are also a host of startups that proved rather quick out of the blocks. Volocopter has been testing its 18-rotor aircraft for a number of years with trials underway in Dubai, while Ehang and Surefly recently performed their first manned flights, as did the autonomous Passenger Drone.

The designs of these vary but all are built to more or less carry out the same task, lift urban folks up and over busy city centers to cut commute times, improve air quality and reduce congestion on the ground. Most take an electric-only approach, although some, like the Surefly and Rolls-Royce’s EVTOL, use a hybrid powertrain for the extra range that it promises.

Aston Martin’s newly announced Volante Vision Concept would also use a hybrid-electric powertrain, with the cabin designed to carry three adults autonomously across urban centers, and even allow for “inter-city air travel.”

“Humans have always spent on average, one hour commuting to and from work,” says Aston Martin President and CEO Dr Andy Palmer. “The distance we live from our workplace has been determined by the methods of transportation available. The Volante Vision Concept will enable us to travel further with our hourly commute, meaning we are able to live further away from where we work. Cities will grow, and towns that are today too far away from cities to be commutable will become suburban.”

The concept was cooked up with Rolls-Royce, which worked on the hybrid-electric propulsion side of things, along with aerospace researchers from the UK’s Cranfield University, who focused on autonomous flight technologies. Where there are now plenty of available performance specs and footage of the aforementioned flying taxis in action, there’s very little technical detail offered on Aston Martin’s new concept.

Scott Collie –The Aston Martin Valkyrie could be headed to a public road near you.

The bespoke AM-RB001 Valkyrie became one of the most talked about cars in the world when Aston Martin and Red Bull announced it in Melbourne last year, and the hype hasn’t faded in the intervening 18 months. We’ve now been given a detailed look at the road-legal version of the Valkyrie, complete with unbelievably intricate underbody aerodynamics and a stunning, pared-back interior.

We can’t quite believe it either, but apparently the stunning slice of British design and engineering you see here will be road legal. Imagine seeing one sitting at the traffic lights, rubbing shoulders with mundane hatchbacks and hulking four-wheel drives. Most journos scoffed when Aston said the Valkyrie, known as the AM-RB001 at that point, would be an LMP1 car for the road, but this is one case where we’re sure they’re very happy to be proven wrong.

Red Bull Racing aerodynamicist Adrian Newey is responsible for the insane underbody setup, designed to draw as much air as possible over the shapely carbon fiber diffuser through twin venturi tunnels. Newey actually told New Atlas the car debuts technology and aerodynamic devices deemed too radical for the (frustratingly restrictive) F1 rule makers.

The unique underbody aerodynamics bring a number of advantages. Aston Martin says the car develops more than 1.8 tons of downforce at high speed, so the system clearly works, but it also makes for a fascinating profile. There are a lot of interesting cutouts and shapes lurking under the smooth bodywork, but the top of the car is unmistakably an Aston. The pairing of Newey and Marek Reichman, Head Designer at Aston Martin, is one we’d love to see more of in future.

The body cleverness extends beyond the underbody, with some beautifully nerdy solutions for saving weight. The headlamps use an anodized aluminum frame to shave between 30 and 40 percent from the lightest headlight assembly used in current Aston Martins, and the high-mounted central rear light is the world’s lightest. Meanwhile, the badge is just 70 microns thick – making it 30 percent thinner than a human hair.

This fanatical gram-shedding continues inside as well, where the luxurious detailing from the DB11 and Vanquish has been replaced with a pared-back look. The seats are mounted directly to the carbon tub, and four-point harnesses are standard. Aston says the feet-up driving position is reminiscent of modern Le Mans and F1 racers.

Anything that could distract from driving (very quickly) has been stripped from the dash, leaving three screens and a detachable steering wheel festooned with buttons. Crucial info about the car is displayed on the large OLED screen behind the wheel, while the compact units on the A-pillars are there in place of conventional rear-view mirrors.

It’s nice to see rear-view cameras and screens make the jump from concept to reality, where they offer all-weather visibility and neat aerodynamics that a regular mirror can’t. There’s even room for taller drivers in the cabin, with Aston Martin saying people in the 98th percentile for height can squeeze in.

The TMC Dumont’s 36-inch rims make it look like a rolling pair of spectacles – and a spectacle it certainly is.

Impractical? Sure! Vulgar? Most certainly. Unique? In every sense. This staggering custom motorcycle uses the biggest pair of hubless wheels we’ve ever seen, as well as placing the rider astride a snarling, 300-horsepower Rolls-Royce aircraft engine. Live in fear – of corners, if nothing else.

The TMC Dumont is the work of Brazilian ex-Formula One driver and champion motorcycle custom builder Tarso Marques. Its name is a tip of the hat to Brazilian aviation pioneer Alberto Santos-Dumont, who Brazilians believe got an airplane aloft before America’s Wright Brothers.

Hence the aircraft engine – a monstrous Continental flat six from the Rolls-Royce aircraft company that was lifted from a 60’s-era aircraft and polished within an inch of its life.

Three hundred horsepower (224 kW) is a heck of a lot for a motorcycle, and it’s even madder when you look at the bike’s signature feature: gargantuan, hubless 36-inch wheels that sit high enough to block the rider’s view, and connect to underslung swingarms by the flimsiest of connections.

Canadian-based aviation firm Opener Inc. has unveiled its new BlackFly single-seater aircraft, which it bills as a Personal Aerial Vehicle (PAV) and the world’s first ultralight all-electric fixed-wing Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) aircraft. The fully-amphibious drop-shaped flyer with fore and aft wings sporting eight electric motors has a range of 25 mi (40 km) and a top speed of 62 mph (100 km/h).

According to Opener, the BlackFly is “designed and built for a new world of three-dimensional transportation.” Due to its limited capabilities, the company says that it is easy to operate and can be flown in the United States from small grassy areas without formal training or FAA licensing.

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The BlackFly is the result of nine years of development with over 1,000 test flights and boasts triple modular redundancy for greater safety, as well as an optional ballistic parachute. The company claims that it charges in under 30 minutes, has a low-noise signature, is geo-fence capable, and even has an Automatic Return-to-Home button.

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Opener says that though the present version is somewhat limited, it hopes that it will one day lead to rural/urban commuting networks powered by renewable energy sources.

.“Opener is re-energizing the art of flight with a safe and affordable flying vehicle that can free its operators from the everyday restrictions of ground transportation,” says Marcus Leng, CEO. “We will offer competitive pricing in an endeavor to democratize three-dimensional personal transportation. Safety has been our primary driving goal in the development of this new technology. Opener will be introducing this innovation in a controlled and responsible manner. Even though not required by FAA regulations, BlackFly operators will be required to successfully complete the FAA Private Pilot written examination and also complete company-mandated vehicle familiarization and operator training.”

The Cuda underwater jetpack is currently at the prototype stage, but is heading for production in early 2019 (Credit: 3D Hubs)The UK’s Archie O’Brien had a dream of zipping below the waters off Iceland or swimming with dolphins off the coast of Bora Bora. He looked at contraptions that would pull him along underwater at speed – something like the AquaJet H2 or Scubalec, for example – but everything already available proved beyond his reach. So he decided to design and build the Cuda underwater jetpack, which will be going into production early next year.

O’Brien developed the Cuda while in his final year at the Loughborough Design School in Leicestershire, noting that existing products were either too heavy, too slow or far too expensive. His original idea was simply to try and shrink down a jet ski engine so that it could be worn as a jetpack, but this didn’t hold water.

The Cuda is about the size of a small backpack and has been built around a patented propulsion system. No details of exactly how this works have been made available, though Amsterdam’s 3D Hubs was responsible for making the impeller, which was SLS printed using carbon fiber-infused powder, chosen for its stiffness.

For the rest of the Cuda, which can be assembled in less than 10 minutes, O’Brien has used a combination of CNC machining, turning and, mainly, 3D printing. The latter making use of low cost and commonplace Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) technology and PLA materials. To keep the Cuda prototype running smoothly underwater, all 45 3D-printed components were coated in a thin layer of epoxy resin and the access hatches for the hotswap rechargeable batteries and electronics were treated to silicone seals.

The speed of the Cuda prototype is controlled by a handheld remote, but otherwise leaves the hands free, and direction is altered by moving the body. It’s been tested in swimming pools and open water, and O’Brien now aims to take the Cuda into production during Q2 2019.

Some of the earliest houses in Northern Europe were made out of slabs of peat, as it was a cheap and abundant building material. Now, Estonian scientists are revisiting the idea of peat houses, only this time they’re looking at 3D-printing the things.

Peat is plentiful in Estonia, as it’s found in the wetlands that cover approximately 22 percent of the landscape. Another thing that Estonia has a lot of is oil shale ash – the country produces an estimated 7 million tonnes (7.7 million tons) of the waste substance annually, only 5 percent of which gets repurposed.

To that end, researchers from the University of Tartu and the Estonian University of Life Sciences have created a 3D-printable concrete-like material made mainly from milled peat, with oil shale ash serving as a binder. Silica nanoparticles are also added to the mix.

In past efforts to create peat-based building materials, the chemical qualities of peat have prevented binders from hardening. Thanks to oil shale ash’s very high pH value, however, that isn’t a problem this time around.

The resulting material hardens within one day of being printed, although it still retains an elastic quality for some time after – this means that blocks of it can be stacked snugly together, without any gaps between them that would allow wind to pass through. It’s also said to be strong, light, durable and incombustible (despite the fact that peat is commonly burned as fuel), plus it exhibits a low rate of heat transfer, and is good at blocking sound.

The CanguRo personal assistant/smart scooter can follow its user around or provide a motor-driven ride (Credit: Yusuke Nishibe).

Folks looking for a last mile transport solution have choice-a-plenty nowadays, but the CanguRo offers more than just a comfy ride. The RidRoid robot – a mash up of ride and android – has some useful smarts cooked in, being able to follow its user around between rides, or make its way to a meeting point on its own.

Developed by Shunji Yamanaka at Chiba Institute of Technology’s Future Robot Technology Research Center (fuRo) in Japan, the CanguRo is designed to be a follow-me personal assistant and (slow poke) people mover. In the former mode, it’s 550 mm (21.6 in) long and uses artificial intelligence smarts known as scanSLAM to generate 3D maps using data from sensors and estimate its own location within that space.

That sensor array includes 3D LiDAR, a wide angle camera and distance sensor. It runs on fuRo’s own robot operating system, and can automatically follow its user around or be wirelessly controlled from a tablet or smartphone. And it can be automatically sent to a specific location, to meet its user after a meeting perhaps.

The CanguRo can also transform into a scooter-like transporter, raising the seat and lengthening the ride to 750 mm (29.5 in). It rolls courtesy of in-wheel brushless motors to the 12-inch wheels at the front and steers via the 10-inch chunky rear wheel. A top speed of 10 km/h (6 mph) and 0.93 Nm of torque isn’t going to win any races, but should get its rider to the lecture hall or board room in a relaxed state.

Consciousness: Where is it? What is it? No one single perspective seems to be able to answer all the questions we have about consciousness. Now Bernardo Kastrup thinks he’s found one. He calls his ontology idealism, and according to idealism, all of us and all we perceive are manifestations of something very much like a cosmic-scale dissociative identity disorder (DID). He suggests there’s an all-encompassing universe-wide consciousness, it has multiple personalities, and we’re them.

Kastrup’s paper is an attempt to devise an explanation for consciousness that leaves no unanswered questions behind as other commonly held perspectives do, at least at our current level of scientific knowledge. (Kastrup is a computer engineer specializing in AI and reconfigurable computing.)

Physicalism and substance dualism

There are a seemingly endless array of ultimately unsatisfying isms thrown at the problem of consciousness. If you’ve got some time, have a look at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Here, though, if only to explain what panpsychism, the basis of Kastrup’s idealism, isn’t, it’ll be helpful to talk very briefly about two of the most popular ontologies to which it’s a response.

Physicalism describes the belief that consciousness is a product of interaction between different types of physical matter. For many, though, physicalism falls into a seemingly uncrossable chasm between strictly physical processes on one hand, and our “phenomenal experience” — the experience of experiencing — on the other. One is chemical, electrical, mechanical, and the other is…something else. Physical processes may be able to explain how we know a roaring fire is hot, but not what warmth feels like to us.

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In substance dualism, there’s physical substance and immaterial substance, consciousness, and they’re two separate domains. This seems intuitively true to a lot of people — think body and soul — but if they are fundamentally different things, what means of exchange, or “language,” could they possibly have in common, and how could they interact? How could a physical experience make our consciousness feel a certain way, and how could a purely mental decision cause our body to take action? And where exactly could this happen?

Take one dash of constitutive panpsychism

Kastrup’s system is based on an ontology growing popular with some philosophers, and with some physicists, called constitutive panpsychism. (We’ve explained this concept in greater detail before at Big Think.) It’s basically the idea that everything, all of the tiny subatomic particles that make up the universe’s mass, have consciousness, a sense of what it’s like to have an experience. We have consciousness because it’s everywhere. In this way, it’s all there is.

The beaches around Pensacola now have purple flags to alert swimmers about the underwater creatures, which leave itchy, irritated rashes with bumps and welts.

Sea lice rash – Florida Department of Health

The sea lice are actually tiny jellyfish larvae and cells, Dave Greenwood, the director of public safety for Pensacola beaches, told the Pensacola News Journal.

“They aren’t very intense, which is why we call them sea lice and not sea hornets or sea wasps,” he said. “It’s just one of those you have to deal with when you go into the Gulf of México. You are a land animal and the Gulf is not our native environment.”

The GXV-T program aims to move away from heavy armored vehicles in a quest for battlefield superiority, using some unique ideas (Credit: DARPA)

Back in 2014, DARPA announced the launch of its Ground X-Vehicle Technology (GXV-T) program, an initiative designed to break through a single paradigm that has been weighing the military down in ground combat. That paradigm is the ever-escalating vendetta between tanks and anti-tank guns.

Artillery designers keep making bigger anti-tank guns, and in response the tank designers have to load them up with more and more armor, to the point where the M1A2 Abrams (the main battle tank of the US Army) now weighs a staggering 72 tons.

That’s nearly twice the weight of a semi-trailer loaded to its maximum legal capacity of 40 tons, and it makes the modern tank a real pain to deal with, from the build, maintenance and deployment, right through to the end use. They’re not what you’d call light-footed or agile, and their sheer bulk can damage or destroy roads or bridges that aren’t up to the task.

DARPA has thus been working on what comes next: smaller, lighter, more nimble vehicles that have tricks other than massive armor up their sleeve when it comes to surviving on the battlefield.

Last month, the GXV-T program demonstrated some of the remarkable technologies it’s been working on. And while they’re far from finished, there are some pretty radical ideas in there. Let’s take a look:

The discovery that life evolves to fit it’s environment in the East and the West. (Source: informationisbeautiful.net)

In the West, we tend to suppose that all of the best scientific discoveries happened in Europe or North America. This is inaccurate, for while Europe was in the dark ages the Islamic Caliphates were enjoying a golden age of scientific progress, cultural achievements, and economic growth.This golden age lasted almost 700 years and influenced every field of scientific discovery. It was promoted by lots of funding for the arts and sciences and refinements in the scientific method combined with better communications between distant scientists.

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The golden age ended after the destruction of Bagdad by the Mongols and a general turning of interest away from science between the 13th and 14th centuries. Right as the Islamic Golden Age ended, the Renaissance began in Europe. With the help of Greek and Roman texts the Islamic world preserved, Europe would ultimately reach the heights of Arabian science and later surpass it.It didn’t happen overnight though, here are ten things the Islamic world discovered first and how long it took the West to figure it out afterward. Many dates and details are taken from this infographic at informationisbeautiful.net.

The Heliocentric Model

While the Ancient Greeks knew the Earth went around the sun, the idea that the Earth was the center of the universe came to prominence during the Roman Empire. This worldview was dominant until the 17th century.

However, during the golden age, several Arabic astronomers began to suggest that the sun was the center of the solar system. In the early 11th century the Iranian Al-Sijzi argued that the Earth rotated on its axis and his contemporary Alhazen wrote a book criticizing parts of the Ptolemaic view of the universe.

It wasn’t until 1453 that Copernicus made the same suggestion in Europe, using a model of planetary motion that was similar to one that the Islamic world had already developed.

Zero

In 813 a Persian mathematician named Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī was the first Islamic scholar to use Hindu numerals in his work, including zero. He also explained that a person should put a zero in places with no value, such as the tens place in the number 101, to “keep the rows.” Given how cumbersome previous methods of expressing zero were in Arabic, this was a huge step forward for mathematics.

It was another 150 years before Europe used what we now call Arabic numerals. They first appeared in Codex Vigilanus, a collection of Church documents. However, the zero was not included. Getting a number to represent nothing, a major conceptual issue for many mathematicians of the day, would take a few centuries more.

Head-first into infinity and beyond … that’s the Dart Flyer promise (Credit: Ray Research AG) Yes, that’s a head poking out the end of this terrifying personal flight concept. Called the Dart Flyer, it can essentially be looked upon as a quadcopter with a winged pilot cocoon on top of it. Definitely not one for nervous flyers, it’s been submitted as a contender in the GoFly challenge, sponsored by Boeing.

We’re still trying to work out if this Swiss design is a joke. The Dart Flyer, by aircraft design company Ray Research AG, is based on a small-scale, remote-control tailsitter aircraft that its creator believes can be effectively scaled up into a one-man aircraft that could turn the human body into a flying missile with your noggin as the warhead.

If it looks a little sketchy to you, fear not. The creator says its four electric rotors use “fail-safe electric propulsion,” that it flies “without any single point of failure,” and “guarantees that each of the four motors provides at least 75 percent power, even after any kind of failure.” You’ll forgive us if we don’t volunteer to put those claims to the test.

The idea is that you’d strap yourself into that tight cocoon, looking like you’re about to be shot out of a cannon. You’d then take off vertically, before going to a horizontal orientation to make use of the battery-saving lift and range those small wings could provide.

Here’s an odd little commuting curiosity from Romania called the Carpii 4ciclet. It’s a four-wheeled stepper cycle targeted at older riders that transfers most of the pedaling work from the quads over to the calves, back, abs and backside. It’s creator claims it’s a particularly energy efficient design, but it sure looks odd to ride.One stands upon the 4ciclet’s angled footboards, either resting on the seat or standing up for a bit of extra pedal power, and pushes down with alternate heels to get the thing going. Each pedal is connected to a lever that pushes down and directly applies torque to one of the 12-inch wheels, like so:https://youtu.be/DxWNG40tv4oIt’s a single speed device, adding to mechanical simplicity but restricting the speed range. The designer says he’s tested it from walking pace up to 32 km/h (20 mph) thus far, and that you need to stand up and give it a bit of gumboot to get up a hill.(For more information visit: https://newatlas.com/carpii-4-wheel-bike/54904/)

Eindhoven, the Netherlands, looks poised to become something of a 3D-printed architecture boom town. Following the construction of a 3D-printed bridge in the city, a total of five rental homes made using the cutting edge tech are now planned too. Read more

I thought that the urinal was the only safe place left to get away from ads being played, but nope. And once you start peeing you are a captive audience as long as that stream is going with these new video urinals from Dutch toilet company Mr.Friendly. Brilliant idea, marketing guys.

This high-tech urinal actually has several nice features like a waterless/flushless function and an anti-bacterial surface, but the big new upgrade is the built-in display with an automatic sensor that’ll play advertisements while you pee.

I know that online they use ads based on your browsing and buying habits, so I can only guess that this thing chooses the ads based on peeing technique? I hope it doesn’t have any other sensors that give it info about your junk because it could be pretty embarrassing if several guys are peeing and watching ads, and one guy gets the erectile dysfunction ad.

Also, we probably shouldn’t be distracted in the bathroom unless you want pee everywhere. Let’s just focus on the task at hand and leave the urinal an ad-free zone, guys. And how many people are going to be pissed off at the ads so that they piss on them for real? People are nasty after all. This is a bad idea.

New studies rekindle debate over whether obesity can be beneficial in some health situations(Credit: Whitewolf/Depositphotos)

Over 15 years ago, a strange counter-intuitive bit of data was identified in patients undergoing hemodialysis for chronic kidney disease. Across several studies, overweight or mildly obese patients were displaying greater survival rates than those with healthy weights. The phenomenon was dubbed the “obesity paradox” and for well over a decade scientists have debated what could be causing it. Several new studies presented recently at the European Congress on Obesity have added further weight to the hypothesis of an obesity paradox, finding several strange correlations between obesity and survival rates across a variety of conditions.

The first study looked generally at patients admitted to hospital for an infectious disease. Tracking more that 18,000 patients admitted to hospitals in Denmark over a four-year period, the study found that within 90 days of discharge those patients of a normal weight displayed a significantly higher chance of dying when compared to both overweight and obese patients.

Two more studies presented at the conference examined mortality rates from patients admitted to hospitals for pneumonia and sepsis. Both studies examined large banks of data tracking admissions from over 1,000 US hospitals.

The pneumonia study, which included data from 1,690,760 hospitalizations, found that obese and overweight patients were between 20 and 30 percent less likely to die from the condition than those of normal weight. The sepsis study impressively gathered data from 3.7 million hospital admissions and found obese and overweight patients were around 20 percent more likely to survive following admission than patients of normal weight.

I’m going through a divorce. It’s amicable, mature, and adult. We just don’t work together as a couple anymore, but we’ll try and remain friends. As a writer, I work from home. I’m alone all day and now, no one is coming home at night. As a result, I’m taking great pains to be social, to go out, to see friends and family, to make phone calls, and to avoid social isolation. There’s no shame in admitting as much, although our rugged individualist society may look down on opening up about such things, especially as a straight male. Aren’t we supposed to be stoic mavericks, able to set out on our own, without anyone’s help at all? Turns out, not so much.

A young man sits by himself in a stadium. Image credit: Getty Images.

In fact, staying connected is the healthiest thing to do, and not just psychologically. According to a 2014 University of Chicago study, loneliness can have a significant negative impact on physical health. It can increase the rate of atherosclerosis—the hardening of the arteries, increase the risk of high blood pressure and stroke, and decrease retention, which can even hurt learning and memory. What’s more, the lonely often make worse life choices and are more prone to substance abuse.

Ireland gives us whiskey, Bitcoin gives us… hmm.

2.55 Gigawatts! The amount of energy Bitcoin is consuming, at the low end, every year; the same as the country of Ireland.

By Paris Martineau – 2018 May 16

In addition to being insufferable, Bitcoin is also absolutely terrible for the environment. According to a letter published today in the energy journal Joule by financial economist and blockchain specialist Alex de Vries, the Bitcoin network is consuming roughly 2.55 gigawatts of energy annually, at the absolute minimum. To put that in context, that’s nearly the same amount of energy consumed by the entirety of Ireland. That’s just the conservative current estimate; De Vries predicts that by December, the Bitcoin network could be using almost triple that.

Bitcoins cost energy to “mine,” because mining is just a computer running calculations; the longer Bitcoin is around, the more energy it takes to mine each subsequent unit (it takes four times as much energy to mine a single Bitcoin now as it did when the currency launched in 2009). There is a finite amount of Bitcoin, and the most recent projections show it will take about another 120 years to mine all 21 million Bitcoins. There is also, theoretically, a tipping point somewhere in there where the amount of energy it takes to mine a piece of Bitcoin is more valuable than the Bitcoin itself, though it all depends on the market value. But Bitcoin transactions, not just mining, take energy (one transaction could currently power a home for a week), so the more widely used it is, the more carbon we are pumping into the atmosphere.

There’s been a considerable amount of debate over the last couple of years surrounding the extent of the energy impact of Bitcoin (for instance, is it pretty bad, or reallyreally bad?), not least because energy use in most parts of the world contributes carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, which contributes to climate change. But in the wake of Bitcoin’s wild valuation ride throughout most of 2017 up to nearly $20,000 per coin, cryptocurrency mining doesn’t seem likely to slow down anytime soon. Researchers need concrete answers before it becomes far too late enact institutional restrictions and regulations on the practice, writes De Vries.

De Vries’ figure doesn’t even include the energy expenditures of other popular cryptocurrencies like Ethereum and Ripple. The altcoin market’s potential for comparably sky-high energy consumption levels is unfortunately all too serious. According to the Digiconomist’s Ethereum Energy Consumption Index (which is technically still in beta), Ethereum production already makes up .09 percent of the world’s total energy consumption. While this may seem like a relatively small amount, it’s not. It’s already more than the total yearly energy consumption of countries like Iceland, Jordan, and Cuba. And given that Ethereum is only just getting started (ugh), this figure will likely only rise.

Energy use of Bitcoin will likely stop growing so fast and even decline in the near future; Grist estimated that at current trends Bitcoin would cost as much energy as the whole world uses now in only two years, an incredibly unlikely situation. It may also be possible to improve mining algorithms so they don’t use as much energy. Still, when the energy use is so high and interest isn’t waning, De Vries is trying to draw attention to the currency’s impact.

“We’ve seen a lot of back-of-the-envelope calculations, but we need more scientific discussion on where this network is headed,” said de Vries in a press release. “Right now, the information available is pretty poor quality overall, so I’m hoping that people will use this paper as a foundation for more research.”

In 1781, the story goes, James Watt needed to convince skeptics to ditch their draft horses and buy his new steam engine. To prove his machine’s superiority, he measured a horse walking in ­circles to turn a grindstone in a mill. He multiplied the distance it walked by its ­roughly 180 pounds of pulling force, divided by the time it took, and came up with a new measure: ­horsepower. (His new engine did the work of 35 nags, about the same as ­today’s ­riding mower.) We still use his math to sell F-150s, but it can feel kind of ­abstract. So we came up with a few new ways to visualize one horsepower.

Neigh sayer. Lucy Engelman

One bicycle burst

In the momentary dash of a flat-out sprint, the average cyclist can eke out a single horsepower. Pro pedalers can generate twice that. Horses, however, have humans beat on staying power; even Tour de France elites can’t sustain more than a few tenths of a horsepower over the full length of a race.

One coffee maker

In electrical work, we measure power in watts, a unit named for dear James. A lone watt is tiny—only enough to power an LED night light. That’s why we almost always talk in terms of kilowatts, especially on electric bills. Still, 1 horsepower’s worth, or 746 watts, is enough to power a standard drip coffee maker.

One enormous dead lift

A foot-pound is the work it takes to lift 1 pound a distance of 1 foot. To exert 33,000 of those all in the space of an extremely sweaty minute, the equivalent of 1 horsepower, an eager equine could drag 10,000 pounds up 3.3 feet, 3.3 pounds up 10,000 feet, or (more realistically) 330 pounds up 100 feet.

One pasta party

Pull power and heat are two sides of the same coin (a coin made of energy). To convert, you’ll have to work with British thermal units. One Btu provides roughly a kitchen match’s worth of warmth (or, more specifically, one penny match’s worth). A single equine could pound out 2,545 Btu per hour, enough to boil 2.2 gallons of room-temp water (assuming a tight lid and no heat loss in a perfect, imaginary world), which would cook 14 servings of pasta.

DEFINITIONS

work (n.) The amount of force exerted over a distance. Units include foot-pound, kilowatt-hour, and BTU.

en.er.gy (n.) The capacity to do work. has multiple forms, including mechanical, thermal, and electrical.

pow.er (n.) The rate of work, calculated as the amount of work done divided by the time it took to do it.

This article was originally published in the January/February 2018 Power issue of Popular Science.

Note: this article has been updated to add statements and rearrange clauses so as to be more clear. Thank you to the Redditors who checked our work, though we stand by our inefficient method of cooking pasta.

Nuclear power reactors generate nuclear waste, and the reactors themselves become nuclear waste.

Radioactive gasses seep into concrete lodging and decay becoming other radioactive elements. Metal parts in the reactor are bombarded with neutrons during nuclear power production process and become activated radioactive metal.

As reactors and other processing factories that are a part of the nuclear fuel chain shut down, the buildings and their parts, the soil, the uniforms employees wore, the tools used to service reactors and other machinery, etc., all have become contaminated with radioactivity, and must be isolated from the environment and the public.

Instead of paying to manage these contaminated items as the nuclear waste they are, the Department of Energy (DOE) and nuclear industry are attempting to reclassify the waste as “Very Low-Level” and allow it to be dumped in landfills and/or incinerators, or recycled with consumer goods.

If the NRC starts classifying radioactive waste as “Very Low-Level”, massive amounts of nuclear power waste would be allowed to go into regular garbage dumps, to industrial or hazardous waste sites, and into recycling facilities that reuse materials to make everyday household and personal-use items.

Huge amounts of dangerous but hard-to-detect nuclear wastes would no longer be regulated as radioactive and would have “alternative methods of disposal,” not at licensed radioactive waste sites.

Personalized keychains at a tourist shop. Your name can affect your professional and romantic success and even where you choose to live. (Bernardo Barlach)

What’s in a name? There are lots of reason to choose one name or another when naming a child — family tradition, or as a tribute to a beloved relative or friend — but does a name really matter? Research suggests, yes, maybe it does, when it comes to the level of success you’ll achieve in your career and love life, and even where you choose to live. The reasons for this remain in the realm of conjecture, but research has revealed some surprising — and some not so surprising — correlations.

The difference from A to Z

You may not think this matters, but the alphabetical position of the first letter of your name may have two effects:

A 2007 study found that people whose names start with a letter early in the alphabet are more likely to be admitted to schools, even when those late in the alphabet have higher scores. Obviously, this foot in the door can ripple through adult life since it may affect a person’s career choice. Are admissions staff tired and cranky by the time they get to poor Xander?

A 2013 study suggests that if you have a name that comes later in the alphabet, you’re more likely to be an impulse shopper. The study’s authors theorize that this is a product of a lifetime of waiting for your name to be called, leading to impatience.

Familiarity helps in work and love

Marquette University found that people with common names are more likely to be hired for a job than others.

This is even truer if your name is super-easy to pronounce, as an NYU study found, probably because we tend to like what’s easy.

According to one 2008 study, you’re even actually statistically more likely to have a career at a company whose initials mirror your own. Benicio del Toro is welcome any time at Big Think.

Familiarity even seems to affect where we live. We tend to gravitate to places named like us. Did you know St. Louis has an unusually higher percentage of residents named Louis? How about Philadelphia, packed with Philips? Or Jacksonville’s Jacks or Virginia Beach’s Virginias?

In school, a boy with a girl’s name is more likely to be suspended according to one 2007 study.

In romance, a surprisingly high number of people connect with others whose names start with the same letter as theirs do. Xander and Xavier sitting in a tree…

On the other hand, a 2009 study found that if your name is difficult to say, you may have more trouble dating because hard-to-say names are associated with higher risk. Unless of course, you’re hitting on a thrill-seeker.

Women’s names

Men’s names

The image your name conjures up

Unusual names can be viewed as a sign of juvenile delinquency, and make one less likely to be asked in for a job interview, according to a 2009 study.

Sad but true, if your name sounds “white,” you’re more likely to get hired thanks to subliminal or overt racial bias. A study by the American Economic Association documented this pernicious type of labor market discrimination.

The European Journal of Social Psychology found that use of a middle initial makes you seem smarter and more competent. More initial? More better.

Names in the management class

If your name sounds worthy, you’re more likely to rise to the top of the company. A study of German names found that people whose last names were “Kaiser” (“emperor”) or “König” (“king”) were more likely to be bosses than those named “Koch” (“cook”) or “Bauer” (“farmer”).

For some reason, says LinkedIn, men in upper management are more likely to have short names. Maybe it has something with powerful people wanting less intimidating monikers?

On the other hand, LinkedIn notes, powerful women are more likely to use their full names, likely to present a business-like impression.

According to The Atlantic, women with gender-neutral-sounding names are more likely to be promoted in some industries.

That’s what’s in a name. Maybe.

Some of these studies are more convincing than others, and few get into the reasons behind these sometimes-odd correlations. If you’ve got an apparently problematic name according to it all, don’t worry. People do change them. (Joseph’s “Stalin,” which means “steel,” is clearly more imposing than his original “Dzhugashvili.”) And since correlation doesn’t equal causality, we’d better keep studying this.

Alf is the little squirrel who can wheel himself around now.

(Squirrel story has been moved to the “Animals” page…)

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Can you raed this?

Olny 55 plepoe out of 100 can.

I cdnuolt blveiee that I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd what I was rdanieg. The ph aonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno’t mtaetr in what oerdr the ltteres in a word are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is that the frsit and last ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can still raed it whotuit a pboerlm. This is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the word as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? Yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! If you can raed this forwrad it.

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Walk With Me While I Age

I hope this poem has the same effect on you as it did on me; then my forwarding it will be worth the effort.Walk with me while I age – worth the read.

A BEAUTIFUL POEM ABOUT GROWING OLDER

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DAMN ……

I forgot the words…!

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Ads You No Longer See Today….

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Signs Of The Times

Humorous Thinking on Public Display

Seattle Propane at Wallingford Chevron has a person with a good sense of humor running their sign department.23456789101112131415161718